Tuesday, June 20, 2017

The continued failure to find SUSY

Many theorists had also hoped that supersymmetrical particles would show up when the Large Hadron Collider was finally turned on in 2010. Indeed the mystery particles could have shown up even earlier, in the collider’s predecessors, according to some versions of the theory.

As a headline in The New York Times put it in 1993: “315 Physicists Report Failure in Search for Supersymmetry.”

So far they are still failing. In May, a new analysis by the 3,000 physicists monitoring the big Atlas detector (one of two main detectors in the CERN tunnel) reported no hints of superparticles up to a mass of almost 2 trillion electron volts. ...

Not everybody is ready to give up on supersymmetry or to pay off bets.

Gordon Kane, a superstring theorist at the University of Michigan who is well known in the community for his optimism about supersymmetry, ...

Another staunch supporter is John Ellis, ...

“It took 50 years to find the Higgs,” he said, standing beside his multistory detector, known as CMS, 300 feet underground one morning.

“Patience is clearly a virtue in physics,” he added.

SUSY requires dozens of new particles that have never been found. There are theorists who have a belief that it would make the theory nicer, but those ideas have never worked.

I don't see any end to this. In 20 more years, we could still have no SUSY particles, but still have most prominent theoretical physicists believing in them. The same could still be true in 50 or 100 years. Nothing will cause the advocates to give up, just as no one is going to give up on climate change.